#UE5 Series: Substance 3D plugin in UNREAL Engine

hello everyone reza here with another unreal engine 5 video in this tutorial i will explain how to use substance 3d plug-in inside unreal engine 5 and all the do's and don'ts you need to know when you use this amazing plugin so let's get started [Music] [Music] cool so let's start with the adobe page where you can actually download the plugin i'm going to click on that plugin and that takes me to epic games page the marketplace where you can actually sign in to download so i'm going to click on that button and of course you log in with your own credentials either gmail or epic games account or what have you into epic games account now you can um basically add your plugin to the engine so you can either add to the card or you can click free and add that plugin to your account and to your unreal engine 5 open in launcher i'm going to click on that and accept and close this popup window and of course that takes me to epic games launcher where i actually download the plugin all i need to do is to install to engine so click and it asks or verifies what version you would like to install it to obviously version five and it goes through the installation process through the download page and you can see that in the viewport as well we're done with the installation process let's launch unreal engine 5 and get to the project browser window [Music] now i have the project browser open it's time to specify the location project name and the industry that we are using through this project browser so i'm gonna go to games i'm going to go with a blank scene we don't really use starter content i already have a model that i would like to bring and test a substance plug-in ray tracing should be off ue5 lessons is already selected it's that folder right here and i save all of my lessons into that folder i just need to name this so i'm just going to call this lesson9 underscore substance plug-in now it says that you know you need to have a shorter naming that's totally fine substance will get the job done and i'm going to go ahead and create perfect i'm here let's start by preparing the scene and putting together all the folders that we need to have so i am going to start by lesson underscore nine and within that we need to have four folders one is called level and that levels folder is going to hold our new levels the next one is going to be props folder and that props folder will keep all the 3d objects that you may bring from your 3d software packages in my case is it is autodesk maya the next folder i'm going to create it's called materials we'll definitely need to have some materials in place some may not have materials and because of that we're going to use substance plug-in and of course with every material you may or may not have some texture so i'm just going to put that in place just in case see how we go i don't mind create a brand new level so i'm just going to go with the basic one and let's save all of that and save the current level and i can easily save that current level into this levels folder that i've created so everything seemed to be okay time to load up the plugin because right now substance plugin is not um here we need to activate that to do that you just go to edit and you pay a visit to plugins and you just type in substance substance plugin is here you're going to take that and of course you need to restart the engine to load up the plug-in so i'm just gonna go ahead and restart now and the reason i'm doing this right now because it's much faster to load up on real engine as opposed to setting up the entire scene bringing the model the materials and everything it's going to take more time so restart now and you can see it will go through restarting the engine fairly quickly fantastic i'm going to close the plugins window and if you look closely we now have the substant 3d button and that's the plugin that we are going to use for this tutorial now let's switch back to maya and have a look at what model i would like to bring to unreal engine to basically test our scene so i'm just going to minimize um unreal engine 5 and let's bring up autodesk maya cool here's the model that i have in mind it's more like an office futuristic looking office um there's really not much to it so um i've got few groups for pipes for this crate that we're going to texture for these walls that we are going to texture and for the door that again i would like to texture uh this group right here and uh the pipes i've already gone ahead and textured them using adobe substance 3d painter so i really don't need to worry about them and i'm going to focus on these three models so if i look at the uvs and bring them over you can see there's nothing special about this no flipped shell no overlapping shells everything is within zero to one same with the door of course fairly straightforward i can actually go ahead in here and just ever so slightly bring the whole thing to the position just to make sure that everything is within zero to one and you do not have any issues there and of course i've got walls which i will talk about later i would like that to be a surprise because uh something is missing when it comes to this model but without getting too much into it if you look at the render that we have right now i've got some emissive materials a red emissive material a blue emissive material and of course a white emissive material so ideally i would like to preserve those inside uh unreal engine 5 when i bring everything to the engine so we've already gone through the process of exporting in our basic lighting tutorial tool so i'm not going to spend any time on it feel free to click on the pop-up banner on the top right and i will put the link in the description below so you can sort of access that video tutorial that video walks you through how to export your model so um let's go through that you can go send to unreal selection or you can go to export selection and go to the option box and from here pick either fbx or obj i'm going to actually pick fbx and let's switch back to unreal engine 5 and have a look at their scene [Music] cool here i am inside unreal engine 5 i brought the scene and basically distributed um all the materials textures and props into the folders that we created in the previous chapter so we're ready to go i'm still using this um new level basic level that we created so everything is good to go i've also gone ahead and put some lights in the scene well to begin with there was some default lights and that i really didn't tweak that and of course um what i did i created a sort of a few night time-ish looking scene as well just to give it an artistic look and that allows me to kind of test um my materials um during daytime and night time so i can turn this off at any point of time turn this one on and just uh dropped in a post-process volume as well we've got just a fixed exposure for the entire scene again these are the things that i already talked about during my lighting video so if you're in doubt definitely check those videos let's get to the substance 3d plug-in part now i'm ready to go all i need to do is just to go in here and click on this arrow for this substance 3d plug-in that we loaded in the previous chapter you can have access to substance 3d assets to bring in some 3d assets i really don't need to i already have a 3d asset in the scene and you can go to 3d community asset and get your hands on not only 3d assets but also textures so i'm just going to click on that and that is going to take me to this page now you can see you have access to just under 800 materials that you can use and bring them into your scene and apply them to your model so let's see what we need if i just toggle back we need a material for this crate hopefully a wood material some sort of a material for the walls and a material for the door so what i'm thinking for the door is some sort of a metal interesting looking material not too complex same for the wood and for the walls i will deal with this in the next chapter because as i said something is missing in this object and i intentionally kind of mix that in so it's an opportunity for us to learn about different scenarios okay just uh let's focus on the wood at this stage let's switch back to the page cool and i'm gonna go in here and pick wood and let's see what we have we have different types and i am not really quite sure what i want so i'm just going to see for example this one looks interesting this one looks interesting um painted plank so let's have a look i'm going to click on this looks actually too stylized for this particular project but again we just want to have fun i want to learn probably not the best choice but i really like the style and the look of this now you can see you can download spsar file in case if you don't know what spsar file is it's a compiled sbs file and in case if you don't know what sps file is it's a substance designer source file the difference between these two is for sps ar file you really don't need to have substant designer to open the file and in case if you're wondering do you really need to visit this 3d community asset every single time you would like to bring a texture into unreal engine you know you really don't need to if you're using substance designer or sampler you can actually export your final texture as spsar file and once you have those then the process of bringing those asset files into unreal engine is pretty much the same so let's go ahead and click on download and it's going to save the file right one down three to go the next uh material i'm trying to find is a sort of a metal so i'm just gonna go and find a metal material wow we've got some really cool ones in here uh this one looks actually really good so i'm just going to click on that metal with holes yeah that gives us enough i don't want to make the door too complex or put too much patterns in it again the whole idea behind this tutorial is not really to look dev something but to understand how to bring a material inside unreal engine so i'm just going to download that one as well again at any point of time i may go back and download some extra materials in there i've got some really cool looking sci-fi door panels or floor panels so i've got one in here as well sci-fi floor tiles i'm just going to have a quick look at it see how it looks and that looks really nice again sci-fi floor tile metal these are the keyboards that have been used for this so it's got a bit of a tiling uh situation going on and looks very futuristic i'm definitely going to download this and there was another one that caught my eyes and that's this one here and this one here actually i'm going to download both you can click on this little guy here to download so that should really do the trick one two three four five i will be using probably three only uh we see how we go all right going back to unreal engine 5 it's time for me to transfer these materials into unreal engine 5. so let's go to the next chapter and apply our materials [Music] i'm just going to go in here under lesson 9 i need to create another folder and i'm going to call this substance 3d matte for material i'm going to start with the plank painter wood texture and as soon as you drag and drop and of course you can right click and import getting the same result i'm getting this window substance import options let's see what this is about i'm just going to maximize it so we see everything in here first things first create default instance well that's fantastic because every time you use a master material we all prefer to have an instant material and deal with parameters as opposed to the material graph so almost every single time you need to have this ticked otherwise if i turn this off you can see all the options will go away and you just deal with the master material by itself and you need to create your own instance material whereas this guy does that for you now the path has already been created but in case if you need to change it you can always specify default instance path and relocate your instant graph and that's the name for it the suffix inst meaning instance this node comes from the original sps ar file and it gives you some parameters more on that later um then you create the actual material from the spsar file you name that whatever you want to name it underscore matte and that is your actual material that's the material that you actually drag and drop onto the model and we almost deal with the same scenario where you can specify a different location for the material or leave it as is because we already have a folder for it called substance 3d underscore matte and both nodes will go into this folder then we have material template type which is you want to use this material and use it from scratch or you would like to assign a parent material to it which we're not going to use or you would like to generate a material inside unreal and make that apparent which again that's something that we really don't want to use we want to use that substance default material that we picked and assign that to our object so the only thing left is this drop down here and because i have proper uvs on my models i would like to use substance standard template because that template allows me to use my uv information and apply the texture on to the model simple as that so i'm just going to go here and import and that gives me these nodes this is my original spsar file unreal calls this instance factory then we've got parameters that comes out of this asset file or asset material and that allows me to tweak the attributes for this material then we have all the maps with the correct color space and i just love that about unreal that simplifies everything for us for example if i double click on this you can see srgb is on it's an srgb file we don't need to do any extra work whereas if i click on the metalness or metallic srgb is off because it's a linear file so it's all done for us we really don't need to do anything and we get to have the actual material the one that we can drag and drop if you look at the parentheses in front of the name you can see it's a material instance if i double click in here you can see that i'm getting some attributes to play around with which is fantastic that's exactly what you expect to see and from here you can actually change if you want only if you want you can change the actual base color texture along with metallic roughness and you may say reso white is it useful well sometimes you need to make adjustment to the texture with that you can take that texture to an editing application and tweak the texture tweak its metalness map tweak its roughness map and re-import it and select those as your new roughness map if only if you need that and you have control over its tiling you can offset and tile and scale if need be so that's very handy and that's how you basically work with an instance material i have a complete video on this so if you're unsure about instance material and what's the difference between instance and parent make sure to check out that video i put the link in the pop-up banner on the top right no thank you i don't want to save at the moment so that's pretty much it so what i'm going to do i'm going to go in here and just drag and drop this guy on to the crate now you can see it looks crazy because i need to make some adjustments when it comes to the tiling of it the position of it so on and so forth so bringing a material is really that easy so let's go in here and readjust our material a little bit so it looks better at least the way that it distributes and only then we deal with its color because i really dislike this blue at least not in this scene it just doesn't go well but you may have noticed if i double click in here there is no option here for me to change this color and that's another reason i wanted to bring this material because sometimes you actually need to change the color you may say reza well you explained it you just bring this into a program like photoshop and changes color well actually there is a much easier solution to that you can actually do that right inside unreal engine 5. so i'm going to click on this wooden crate pressing f to zoom in a little bit and obviously the scale is a bit off tiling is a bit off so we need to actually address that i'm gonna go in here and move that to the side so i know what i'm doing i'm gonna move this guy here and zooming it up position it carefully and that should do the trick let's see what options we have to at least um fix the placement of this material we've got tile link that's fantastic so let's make use of these parameters and re-adjust the wood pattern on this material and you can sort of play around with some decimal values and really tweak that so that aligns these two pieces of line beautifully and i'm quite happy with what i'm getting right now so the placement of it call it done ish so i'm just gonna go in here and save and close now let's deal with its color when it comes to extra attributes that's where you use this underscore inst which is coming from this sps ar file this one is called substance graph instance so this is material instance this one is substance graph instance which is coming from this material right here so based on the type of sbs ar file or asset file that you bring into unreal engine you make it get a slightly different attributes inside your substance graph instance material so i'm just going to double click on it here and you can see we have access to extra attributes the output you may turn things on and off here say i don't want to have a normal map or i don't want to have a roughness maybe i would like to introduce a height map if that's the case you click on this magnifier and actually browse to bring that asset or attribute and then map into your content browser so that's very handy and based on what you've imported right here you're getting these tick boxes but the beauty of that is this you can actually enhance the resolution i'm just going to close this content browser right here [Music] if you feel like you need more resolution and you have a close-up shot of this crate here then you go and give this a higher resolution you want to randomize the texture you can do that right here tiling also can be done here so x amount look what this does it actually takes care of the texture for you y amount you can pretty much do the same thing so i really like that about graph instance material because it actually allows you to even tweak your tiling and the nature and the look of your textures even further now the part that i'm really pleased about is this where you can actually change the color of it so let's say i really don't like this um pink color well it looks actually beautiful but it doesn't go well with what i have in the scene so i'm gonna turn this completely off and turn it to a black color as you can see that immediately took place and this blue color although it looks really cool may not go well with what i have so i personally would like to use a sort of a different look that doesn't look too bad i'm just going to sample one of these guys right here um maybe slightly bright brown color and that should do the trick yep i'm quite happy about this i'm just going to go and hit save and close and you can see we successfully brought in a material and assigned this to our model now let's do the same thing but in a much quicker fashion apply the metal that we have the metal with holes material that we have to this door right here and at this point of time i actually would like to try this out and have a look at it in the night time as well to see how this looks in nighttime or in a darker environment it's not particularly nighttime but a dark environment so i'm going to turn off default lighting and turn on this sort of a night-ish looking lighting that i put together so everything looks pretty good it actually responds to the reflection really well and you can see the wooden crate also works pretty well i'm quite pleased with uh how it turned out fantastic so so far so good let's go to the next chapter and start working on this wall right here and i will talk about what is actually missing on this wall and how this can be addressed inside unreal engine when you wish to bring substance material onto a model like this all right i hope you enjoyed this video so far here's our final chapter now i would like to explain why i left this model this piece separate and i want to deal with it separately here i am back in maya the reason that i want to use a slightly different method for this piece because if i go to uv texture editor we do not have uvs on this piece every single model in here has got uvs but this guy in particular does not have any uvs and that's why we need to sort of deal with that separately one way is to obviously use your preferred 3d application and uv map it and then re-export this piece we don't want to do that and another way of doing it is to deal with it inside your unreal engine 5. now thanks to the new feature inside substance 3d that allows us to use projection to take care of objects with no uvs and i just love this new feature inside this plugin because it makes our life so much easier now remember it's a projection so if you think your object is going to be moved if you think your object will be animated throughout the sequence then that's a different story we need to use a slightly different strategy to deal with it but if it's a fixed object if it's a rigid asset that you've got in the scene you can definitely make use of projection to take care of the material so how can we do that i'm just going to bring the sci-fi tile that i had in the scene so i'm just going to open the content browser and just drag and drop that model in now here's the part where you need to be careful about you need to think about am i going to assign this texture to a static mesh with no uvs if that's the case everything else should look the same the only change you need to make is in here when you need to change your template so instead of using substance standard template you're going to use substance triplinger template that's it and you import you deal with the exact same node so if i just go in here you can see i've got my material instance i've got my instance factory node and i've got my substance graph instance to deal with extra attribute that i may want to have in the scene i've got all of my maps with the right color space all done for me so let's do it now remember this object does not have any uvs but if i drag and drop you can see it looks great thanks to the tri-planer projection i really didn't need to do any extra work and i just love this feature um new feature rather uh when it comes to this nifty plugin all i need to do is to make minor changes to the material instance and we can kind of call it a day so there is not much i need to change to be honest with you probably i am going to change the tiling of it a little bit and the tiling is inside a scale so if i go to texture scaler and expand you can see i have access to xyz and alpha so i am going to move this ever so slightly to the side bring this one right here so i can kind of play around with it x maybe just a little bit i just want to line up these lines with the door frame and there is really not right or wrong it's just a personal preference that i have in mind maybe rotating that and that should do the trick for me that gives me some sort of a border around the door and i'm very happy with the overall look so i can come here and just press save and if you want to tweak the actual color for the panel you already know how to do it i'm going to go to substance graph instance and then in here you can change the colors you can change the repetition you can even increase the quality if you want to i can go in here and ever so slightly and just change the base color you can apply a slightly brighter or darker color based on what you want so really there is no right or wrong here it's just your personal taste that's why i'm not going to spend too much time on it and then once that's done um you can go ahead and try that in daytime and nighttime see which one works for you so if i go to sort of night time you can see get some sort of a gorgeous looking bounce light on this metallic material looks fairly cool um you can even zoom in and see all the tiles you can increase the resolution if need be and that's pretty much it i mean i can um i'm actually tempted to try the other one that we brought in let's see if i can find it so if i drag and drop the other one i'm going to use triplaner and import and i'm just going to drag and drop that to my object and that looks pretty neat as is so you can see how much this this tri-planer scenario can help us with our situation to get a really gorgeous look in no time and that should do the trick that's it thank you very much guys for watching this tutorial and for supporting this channel via my patreon page you can follow me on twitter and my instagram account i put the links in the description so you can kind of keep yourself up to date with all these upcoming projects that i've been working on until the next video stay safe take care talk soon

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 26,998

Keywords: substance plugin, substance plugin unreal engine 5, substance plugin maya, substance plugin ue5, unreal engine 5, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial series, unreal engine 5 series x, unreal engine 4 beginner tutorial series, unreal engine plugins, ue5 tutorial

Id: 6l_zTTo7TSc

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022